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Email Graveyards

It’s a place that lies beyond the illumination of the most impressive memories. A place full of fragments from the years past, which are now incomprehensible to even the brightest of minds. This place is the darkness of the digital world. It’s a place we tend to forget more than we remember – just like that storeroom at your parents’ house.

And like that storeroom, this place houses many different pieces – some accidentally left behind, some simply forgotten, and some originally intended for destruction. The one thing they all have in common is fitting somewhere in the puzzle that is ‘you’. Unlike that storeroom, there isn’t any issues with space. Infinitely expanding, the darkness of the digital world rather resembles outerspace.

It’s depth depends on how long you’ve been digitally active. What you find in there, and whether you dare to go in, depends on you. I’m still as curious as I’ve ever been, so I stepped over several previous-pages and into the area of my inbox that’s become a graveyard to conversations gone cold, romance that’s never returning, and laughter that’s left me in the same way that my favourite red shirt is fading.

Within 1 hour, 70 pages became 1. I could have sped through with the delete-all button; but I had wanted to take the time to cringe where I was weird, acknowledge where I went wrong, and smile where I wasn’t… anyone else but myself.

The past 7 years became 7 days, but not without firstly moving several messages into a newly created folder called ‘memories’. It ended up being more about gratitude than organisation. It’s really something special to be able to ‘remember through technology’, not just by memory. The same task for my parents would involve digging through dusty old boxes that have surely become misplaced and worn over the years; I just clicked ‘sort by date’.

But a mouse is no magic wand. I know there’s no bringing back what’s truly gone. But just like an actual graveyard, going back is sometimes a nice reminder of the magic we had in our lives.